Poorer than your parents? Baby boomers have worked hard

The younger generation shouldn't feel so hard done by

6:59AM GMT 19 Dec 2013

SIR – People born in the Sixties and Seventies may well find it harder to save money for a flat or house than their parents; they may – but I have my doubts – be worse off than their parents’ generation.

However, as a member of the baby boom generation, which seems to get so much flak from those younger than us, I would like to point out that we rarely took family holidays; buying a television was a major investment; few ate out at anything grander than fish and chip shops; clubbing wasn’t really invented yet; most households restricted phone calls because of their cost; and credit – including mortgages – was hard to come by, especially if you were a woman. Does the younger generation still think it’s hard done by?

Marcia MacLeod London NW6

SIR – The future is bleak for all age groups due to the parlous state of the nation’s finances. The last government started the rot, with its overspending, destruction of private pensions, green taxes and mass immigration.

The Coalition has carried on with these flawed policies. David Cameron could put an end to the rot by saying “no” to Nick Clegg and the EU bureaucrats.

Nowhere has the great Trevor Howard been mentioned. It is said that, though 20 years older, Howard always drank Oliver Reed under the table. The long-suffering Mrs Trevor Howard, Helen Cherry, described her husband as “a carouser of Olympian fortitude”.

The IA 1971 sets out the immigration officer’s authority to refuse entry to anyone whose presence in Britain is considered non-conducive to the public good. The rules specifically state that the immigration officer must be satisfied that the arriving passenger is not likely to become a charge on public funds. The problem is that border officers are instructed at present only to swipe passports. If the passport is not a forgery and the bearer’s name does not appear on a warning list, an EU national is waved through without further question.

We need to return to a robust interpretation of the provisions already set out in the Immigration Act 1971.

Robert M Smith Bere Ferrers, Devon

Stephen Ward’s death

SIR – Was Stephen Ward “bumped off” by the Secret Service? No. I worked in both MI5 and MI6 years ago and, though of junior rank, I knew roughly what was going on – neither service had a “licence to kill”. Often many of us wished there was; I would not have shed a tear to watch the feet of the arch-traitor Kim Philby, who caused the deaths of many, sticking out of a stretcher.

I got to know Jack Profumo well, and respected him. The claim that he lied because of security fears seems quite spurious. It is improbable that he had any nuclear secrets of value to Ivanov that the Russian couldn’t read in The Daily Telegraph. Could Profumo’s lying not have been a case of a man anxious not to be embarrassed in his marriage, which was then going through a difficult period?

Maybe Ward’s story is better left to the music hall than to conspiracy fantasists?

“You lied to me,” she hissed. “Next you’ll be telling me there’s no Father Christmas.”

Ian Walker Addingham, West Yorkshire

Right-to-die campaigners are exceptional cases

SIR – Right-to-die campaigners such as Tony Nicklinson or Paul Lamb face quite extraordinary physical incapacity as a result of serious illness and accident respectively. This is not ordinary dying, for example from cancer, heart or lung disease. People dying of these illnesses seldom have the energy, time, or even the foreknowledge of their prognosis to front any campaign.

Campaigning duties are thus passed to certain severely disabled individuals who have sufficient time left, but whose cases are exceptional. While appealing to people’s sympathies, their image distorts public understanding about the ordinary dying people who might make use of any euthanasia law. As the Dutch statistics reveal, the majority of people (78 per cent in 2012) who die through some form of euthanasia have cancer, and most are likely to be very close to their “natural” death.

The extraordinary “right-to-die” cases which come before our courts are, therefore, not representative of the type of dying that might be hastened should any law be enacted by Parliament.

Dr Naomi Richards University of Sheffield

SIR – Lord Davies of Stamford, the former Labour minister (“Doctors accused of 'helping patients on way’ with lethal drug doses”, report, December 13), claims that some doctors are routinely helping patients to die by giving them lethal drugs, and that killing by dehydration amounts to much the same thing.

If such doctors, while publicly professing the highest standards of honesty, were thieves in private, would Lord Davies support the legalisation of theft?

Of course, the 1993 Bland judgment, by allowing doctors, through acts of omission, to kill patients to whom they owe a duty of care, has left the law “morally and intellectually misshapen” and patients at risk. The issue is not the means by which doctors should kill patients, but whether they ought do so at all.

The recent Liverpool Care Pathway scandal, involving the premature deaths of many patients through combinations of dehydration and drugs, should give pause to even the most ardent supporters of health professionals killing patients because it is in their “best interests”.